Modern Warfare 4 could revolutionise the Call of Duty series, hands-on preview

Full text

Two schools of thought exist in the Call of Duty community. One praises the high-speed arcade action of Black Ops sub-series, sliding around corners on smaller maps while racking up incredible kill counts. The other craves the more considered pacing of the recent Modern Warfare games, where firefights are grittier and more immersive, in larger and more complex environments that reward tactical play more than speed and aggression.

With Modern Warfare 4 , developer Infinity Ward is trying to marry both styles of play. “If you're too strict in one direction or the other, that's where it becomes a problem,” multiplayer creative director Joe Cecot explained in my visit to the studio’s Los Angeles HQ earlier this year. “We want it to feel really good for you, but also balanced.”

Pleasing both audiences is a task I would have thought impossible: surely the enjoyment of one is opposed to that of the other?

But, after nearly ten hours hands-on with the ongoing Modern Warfare 4 beta, I think the team might have really pulled it off. That, combined with cutting-edge graphics and a plethora of new mechanical Innovations, has me confident we’re on track for a generational Call of Duty game — maybe even the best in the series so far.

Pleasing both camps

You can rapidly slide around the battlefield... Activision ... but taking things slow is also effective. Activision The first thing any returning Call of Duty player will notice dropping into Modern Warfare 4 is that it’s a very fast and fluid game.

Tactical sprint, the option to double-tap the sprint button to enter a faster stride, is back on by default, and it feels smoother than ever before. Rather than lasting for a fixed duration, your character’s speed gradually decreases as you go to reflect their tiredness — removing that stop-start feeling that made Modern Warfare II ’s pacing so bitty.

The overall movement speed is pretty rapid, helping you traverse maps quickly and minimizing downtime between combat encounters. Going long stretches without coming across other players was a real issue in some of the bigger 6v6 maps of previous entries ( MWII ’s infamously dull Valderas Museum immediately springs to mind) and, while many of the maps available in this beta are quite small, I’m optimistic that it won’t be such a problem this time around.

Overhauled ballistic simulation means the guns in MW4 are more realistic than ever before. Rather than a slapdash bloom calculation, bullet trajectory is authentically calculated based on the actual position of your weapon in the virtual world. It sounds like a minor change, but you can really feel the difference. Hip-firing your guns is genuinely viable now: if your barrel is pointed towards the enemy on your screen, your shot will hit.

(Image credit: Activision) Most guns take a fair chunk of time to aim, so this lets you play more aggressively no matter your chosen weapon type.

Try to take an objective hip-firing a slow-to-aim weapon in MWII, and you’ll end up dead with your entire magazine buried in the nearest wall. In MW4, you actually stand a chance, which stops matches from reaching a gridlock where everyone sticks to cover aiming down their own little sightlines.

It balances out the faster movement perfectly as well. I’ve already encountered players sliding around corners to try to gain an advantage as you can in a similarly snappy Black Ops game and dispatched them effortlessly with a hip-fired shot.

The Zip Gun, an all-new item that replaces the grenade in your lethal slot, is specifically geared towards this kind of situation. It’s a 3D-printed pistol that automatically unloads its entire clip in a quick burst when drawn, giving you a vital last-ditch line of defense if you’re caught mid-reload by an enemy player getting in your face.

You can still win plenty of fights by being fast, don’t get me wrong, and it feels great to do so, but it’s not the one-size-fits-all winning strategy that it is in, say, Black Ops 7 .

Leaps and bounds

Guarding sightlines is still an effective strategy. (Image credit: Activision) But what about those who still prefer to lock down specific zones or slowly advance towards objectives? They’re well catered to with a range of new tools to try. The razor wire field upgrade, for example, is a little mine that deploys a massive coil of barbed wire that slows enemies while draining their health so you can place it in doorways or at keychoke points for effective area denial.

Given all the ways you can counter fast-movers, taking things slow and playing tactically never puts you at a disadvantage. In fact, it can often work in your favor, as the relatively quick TTK (time to kill) lets you shred anyone you manage to catch off guard by flanking.

Although as a die-hard Black Ops fan, I have to admit that sprinting everywhere with an SMG or shotgun is my personal preference, I’ve been experimenting with both styles of play in my matches so far and struggle to label one definitively superior. It’s a genuinely impressive feat for Infinity Ward to have pulled off this tricky balance — doubly so given this is still just a beta and you would expect at least a few teething issues.

The mechanics are nailed down, then, and everything else about MW4 points to an experience that’s equally polished across the board. The maps available to try are well-designed and include a good mix of global locations, all rendered with a stunning level of detail and elevated by plenty of artistic flair, with special details like animated round intros and floating logos to help them all feel distinct.

The sleek user interface seems inspired by classic Call of Duty titles. Activision Modern Warfare 4 also features a new A gunsmith to recommend weapon builds. Activision The randomized Kill Block, with a layout split into three randomized blocks, is a surprising highlight too. Going in, I thought it would be a bit of a gimmick. It’s now become one of my favorite maps thanks to just how varied it is.

The presentation remains extremely strong even outside the matches themselves. That clunky Netflix-style user interface from recent games is gone, replaced with a much sleeker side-bar design, and that boring lobby animation (the one that had your hero wandering around an almost completely blank void) has finally been binned in favor of operator-specific sequences that convey so much more character.

That’s all without getting into the gritty campaign (one great level is available to sample as part of the beta offering) or the promising DMZ extraction shooter mode that will be available at launch. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is on track to be a major hit when it launches for PlayStation 5 , Xbox Series X and Series S , PC, and Nintendo Switch 2 on October 23.